Anghus Houvouras on what Guardians of the Galaxy can teach us about geek marketing….
We live in a time where films are being marketed from the moment they are announced. As soon as Zack Snyder took the stage at Comic-Con in 2013 and announced Man of Steel 2 would actually be Batman vs. Superman, the internet started a steady stream of information that soon turned to a pour, then a deluge.
The internet age has given us unprecedented levels of information about upcoming movies. In the days before the world wide web, you would hear about a movie going into production and would barely hear a word until you saw the trailer, which you weren’t even aware of because back then you didn’t know what previews would be screened prior to the film. I can still remember in May of 1989 recording a summer movie preview special on my VCR that showed behind the scenes footage of Batman and The Abyss and watching it again and again. That kind of advance look was rare and usually limited to 30 second segments on Entertainment Tonight. They were simpler times.
Now we have every detail telegraphed. We know about movies from the moment the pen hits the paper. The Hollywood Reporter releases a blurb online before the ink is even dry. Do they still sign contracts with pens? Am I further dating myself? Now we even know what trailers are going to be attached to movies. The element of mystery is completely gone. Well, not completely.
This week the Guardians of the Galaxy trailer hit and has taken the internet by storm. There’s a lot of buzz around the clip as well as the first poster. Both pieces of media balance space faring adventure with a healthy amount of comedy and swagger. The fact that the words ‘You’re Welcome’ appear under the release date is a testament to Marvel’s resolve to do something different with the marketing. Taking it back to the faucet analogy, Marvel has been giving us a consistent drip with Guardians. Little bits here and there but not showing us too much. For all intents and purposes, the trailer was really everyone’s first glimpse into the world of this widely unknown comic book.
I think you can credit the heavy buzz to the fact that Marvel waited before showing us too much. That steady drip kept everybody curious, and finally when they had something worth showing they turned the faucet up. Right now we have a nice healthy pour of information about the Guardians. The trailer gave us the tone and the characters, but it didn’t dive deep into the story. There’s still an element of mystery to the Guardians, still things left to discover.
On the other side of the sink you have X-Men: Days of Future Past which bypassed the drip and the pour and have been flooding the net with information since sets were being built. Bryan Singer was tweeting random photos every other day. Behind the scenes photos were being printed and published with a ridiculous level of frequency. A teaser trailer was released without a single, solitary ‘Holy Shit’ moment. This past week saw almost two dozen poorly rendered character photos hitting the web. The pipes have burst. The damn has broken. The same strategy was adopted by The Amazing Spider-Man 2 who has been out there every week with a new villain announcement or set photo.
The marketing for Guardians and X-Men is a strong statement about how much better Marvel is at packaging their product than 20th Century Fox or Sony.
What Guardians of the Galaxy can teach us is that geek films are often better served by a ‘less is more’ approach. A steady drip of marketing. A more reserved approach to the reveal. Guardians of the Galaxy is giving us just enough to keep us interested. Where Days of Future Past is involved in an epic data dump that lacks focus and cohesion.
The win for Guardians was being content flying below the radar for awhile. It’s the one Marvel property out there that no one has a strong grasp of. Up until a week ago, people had devoted more words to the lack of tangible information out there about the film than anything official. The Nova Corps Helmets at Comic-Con, Vin Diesel voicing Groot, Bradley Cooper as Rocket. What we didn’t know about the film was far greater than what we did. The more reserved approach feels downright inspired in a day and age of the media onslaught. Days of Future Past and Amazing Spider-Man 2 seemed to employ a less conservative strategy fighting to see who could flood the net with more media. A kind of scorched earth marketing policy that leaves nothing to the imagination. There are no blanks for you to fill in. Only data to parse. A flood to endure.
Geek films could learn something from Guardians of the Galaxy. Generating buzz isn’t always about ‘more’. There’s still a lot of value in the slow reveal and an element of discovery in marketing. Seeing how Marvel is handling Guardians of the Galaxy is downright refreshing.
Anghus Houvouras is a North Carolina based writer and filmmaker. His latest work, the novel My Career Suicide Note, is available from Amazon.
Originally published February 22, 2014. Updated December 13, 2019.
